The Manosphere darlings Andrew and Tristan Tate have been a menace on our feeds for years, earning their scandalous reputation over years of hard work spouting misogyny, trafficking women, having close ties with the Romanian mafia through their cage-fighting and webcam businesses, becoming the faces of modern-day social media misogyny, including being charged with human trafficking.

They could now add another charge to their roster of infamy. In late August, Alicia Kearns, the British Conservative MP and former chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, referred both brothers to Counter Terrorism Policing. The trigger was a forty-minute video the Tates published themselves, documenting a June trip to Russia in which the two rode a Soviet tank, threw grenades and fired a flamethrower on a military range. The question is whether they were required to register under the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, the disclosure regime created by the National Security Act, under which failing to declare that you are acting for a specified foreign power carries up to five years.

No evidence has been produced that the brothers were paid or directed by Moscow. Their representative says the visit was "private and personal," that they received nothing from the Russian state and deliberately stayed away from the St Petersburg forum that many people assume they visited.

But the possibility of these men acting in the Kremlin’s interests is part of a larger pattern. Rather like the looksmaxxing influencer Braden Eric Peters — better known online as Clavicular, they are a fantastic hotbed of propaganda darlings for the Kremlin due to their large audience reach and their simple needs and wants in return for posting content: money, attention and women.

Is Clavicular Russia's Next Useful Idiot?

The Tate brothers epitomize the evolution of how the manosphere is useful to the Kremlin. It begins with a popular figure spouting seemingly innocuous Kremlin talking points. In a re-upload of an old interview, Andrew would argue the familiar line that NATO has always encouraged on Russia following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the loss of Central European countries as the buffer states, adding: "when all these countries that were previously U.S.S.R. now now all join the EU, all join NATO, all put in anti-missile systems along their borders [...] we're the aggressive ones." One could only wonder if such discourse would go down well in the presence of his many Romanian friends.

What about his brother, Tristan? He has been doing much the same work, although largely overshadowed by his older brother. In 2024, Dmitry Medvedev, ex-president of Russia and now a hawk reduced to........

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